Edit This Favorite

Pennsylvania’s Fact-Finding Commission on Video Games and Violence Fails to Find Facts

By the Anti-Censorship and Social Issues Committee of the International Game Developers Association

The Pennsylvania government’s year-long study into harmful effects of video games failed to find any. Their conclusion: keep trying to find some.

The December 2013 "Violence Prevention in Pennsylvania” report provided by the Joint State Government Commission’s Advisory Committee On Violence Prevention is riddled with sloppy scholarship and a deep-seated political hostility toward video games. Though the Commissioners grudgingly admit that "a direct causal link between violent video games and violent behavior has not been established to date,” they try to pump up unfounded suspicions through logical fallacies, guilt by association, inaccurate paraphrases, false equivalencies, and the blatant omission of the reasoning of one of its own members.

Here are a few ways the Commission fails the people of Pennsylvania:

1) Perpetuating a logical fallacy.In a desperate attempt at guilt by association, the Commission claims that "over half of the attackers demonstrated some interest in violence, through movies, video games, books or other media, but no one common type of interest.” Since the same could be said about "over half” of the US population, what is the point of that quote, other than to demonize media, including video games?

Even Commission member Dr. Patrick Markey, associate professor of psychology at Villanova University, has previously ridiculed this flawed thinkingby saying "It could similarly be argued that bread consumption predicts school shootings, because most school shooters likely consumed a bread product within 24 hours before their violent attacks.”

The Commission included some factual comments by Dr. Markey, so why did they choose to omit his rationality on this subject? Why did they choose to perpetuate a logical fallacy instead?

2) Misrepresenting the U.S. Supreme Court.The Commission misquotes the U.S. Supreme Court by saying, "The court found that the current state of research on the effects of violent video games on violent behavior cannot distinguish effects produced by other media.”

Notice how the Commission left out the essential word "small”? This garbled version obscures the fact that the Supreme Court pointed out that "the same effects have been found when children watch cartoons starring Bugs Bunny.” Applying the same methodology to other media finds the same effects even from reading the Bible.

Or ask the U.S. Supreme Court, which repudiated the anti-game researchers, saying "These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason… most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.”

The Commission needs to be honest about how the flawed methods of the anti-game researchers keep getting exposed by large numbers of their peers.

4) Losing the distinction between real violence and imaginary violence.

The commissioners include quotes warning against "misinformation and fears of the unfamiliar,” causing a "moral panic,” the Commission fans the flames of a moral panic when they falsely equate actual violence with imaginary violence:

"In contemporary culture, non-criminal violence is not banned. It is regulated. Cruel and unusual punishment is constitutionally prohibited, and convicted criminals have appeal rights before the death penalty can be enforced. Movies and video games are rated, and music is labeled.”

Movies and games are not "non-criminal violence.” They might depict violence, but they are not violence. Executions and cruel punishments are actual violence; movies and games are not. Small children know the difference between reality and make-believe. Why does the Commission misinform the public by falsely equating the real and the imaginary?

The net result of the Commissions’ many failures is to spread unreasonable suspicion of video games and to perpetuate the moral panic they warn against.

The Commission might make some useful recommendations for curbing violence, like lifting restrictions on the treatment of mental illness, but scapegoating the work of game developers will not help those goals. Any useful conclusions in the report are marred by a persistent anti-game attitude that is still too common in government and the media.

The Commission’s charge was "to conduct a thorough and comprehensive analysis. " By omitting facts and logic to err so often on the anti-video game side, we reluctantly conclude that they failed at their task when it comes to video games. This is not a good sign, given the many other political bodies currently claiming to be fairly and impartially studying imaginary violence. The Commission owes the people of Pennsylvania an amended report that corrects logical fallacies, removes guilt by association, includes the actual reasoning of its own members, accurately quotes the Supreme Court, and honestly acknowledges that the pro-censorship side has been repeatedly caught with flawed research.